BetaCityYEG Summary

This page is a summary of projects that BetaCityYEG has been able to work on with its civic tech community partners. Most are open source and use commercially-available tech components, some require no programming ability at all. The top projects are those that Beta City has undertaken personally, those below are great examples of what other civic tech groups have achieved and made open source. Thanks!

Sample contract – See a copy of a contract that might work in your community to sustain a tech solution.

Google “ParkView” – Use a Ricoh Theta S 360-degree camera to create Google Streetviews of the City’s river valley trails.

CityGram – Citygram is a notifications platform for subscribing to your city, whether it’s bylay violations in your area or building permits along your commute. Sign up to find out about the things that matter to you where they matter to you.

LoRa Network – Citizens can create their own low-cost wireless data transmission network over a large swath of the city (up to 22km) to create a network of sensors that transfer data to a single central node.

Noise Monitoring – Low cost DIY noise monitoring device which can be used to help detect patterns of loud vehicles to help enforce noise bylaws more effectively.

You Can Benefit – We’re making an open-source web tool that will let users enter some basic information about themselves and find out which benefit programs might be best for them

PiAno (public piano recording) – Inside one public piano was placed a Raspberry Pi physical computing device which recorded music as passers-by played

SMS-Based Voting (not open source) – Based on the success of cell phone text-based (SMS) voting in applications like American Idol and the US-based Textizen, BCYEG encouraged the creation of a DIY sms-voting tool.

Twitter Crowdmapping – We used a few avenues for data collection of public art photos and locations including Twitter (using #openartyeg and scraping the data using crowdmapping platform Ushuhidi)

LinkYEG – Linkyeg.ca is an Edmonton, mobile-optimized website that connects homeless and low-income residents with critical and life-saving resources nearby.